Wednesday, October 24, 2012

IExamen#2: Liar Liar -24 Oct 2012 Chris Ridgely

For this IExamen, we were tasked with speaking to people using only useful, kind, and truthful words. This was a difficult and very awkward task as it sometimes proved itself to be as I found myself trying to steer away as much as possible from usually non-awkward conversations. Conversations that can usually be traversed using a quick and easy white lie which, lets face it, everyone does every now and again or using lies of omission to even just answering around a question or conversation. Because of the constraints of this social project which is what I'm going to refer to this as for the blog, it made it a little weird to interact with some people the way I usually do. My interactions actually started to remind me of the movie, "Liar, Liar" starring Jim Carry in which his son makes a wish that he can no longer tell a lie. This movie is of course a comedy and Jim Carry's character is a criminal defense lawyer and this causes him to have trouble keeping relationships happy and makes it quite hard to do his job because the nature of his job as portrayed by the movie is to be a liar in addition to the habitual liar his character already is. I always thought it was a very funny movie but having experiencing a similar tragedy, I can somewhat relate to his character in knowing how much we cater our lives and personality to the people we are talking to. There are many movies that base themselves on this idea but I actually found surprising how much of our relationships with friends and family is actually formed on a base of untruths and lies of omission whether it be about our personality or our experiences in life is very eye opening. Now, let me say before I get any farther in this blog that I am not a habitual liar and I do try to be as truthful and put as much me into my interactions as I can so don't get the idea from reading this that I am fake based on what I'm writing, but the fact that I gained as much insight into the matter from as much as try to be one hundred percent truthful in all my interactions, I can't imagine what this project would be like for someone who habitually lies in all of their interactions if they were tasked to be themselves true and true, and then after that point have to speak in all truths.
As the day went on I felt it was getting easier to talk to people while staying within the parameters of the project but avoiding the awkward conversation tangents was always hard and caused conversations to be more awkward than they otherwise should have been. After a while I actually tried to avoid conversation as much as I could throughout the day just to avoid such interactions. Looking back on it now, I feel as though the only reason some of these conversations were as awkward as they were was because I made them awkward in the way I tried to avoid that tangent. The more I think about what we perceive as awkward, the more I realize that awkwardness is nothing but a thought and projection of confidence. If someone were to say something while lacking the confidence to say it, it will come off as very awkward because it will sound like that person is uncomfortable with saying it. So think about how the receiving end will feel about hearing it? Just as awkward as you felt when you said it but say you said something with confidence and you thoroughly believed that it was not awkward. If you don't perceive what you said as awkward and treat it as just normal conversation piece, the other end will mirror your exact thoughts and nothing will be awkward from that standpoint. I feel as though if I were to have just continued on with the conversation instead of being so conscious with what I was saying and whether being so truthful will make the conversation awkward or not and stayed cool, calm, and collected I would have been perfectly fine and conversation would have flowed naturally.
As for this IExamen, this was the most insight I was able to mine as I already try to be as truthful in my social interactions as possible but I think the mere fact that I was able to pull as much insight from this project is a testament to how much our interactions with those around us is actually based on untruths to essentially save face and keep appearances to keep our interactions as easy and non-offensive as possible. Not that this is essentially a bad thing because if you think about it, conversations and relationships work like this because we care about the other person. If you watch the movie "Liar, Liar" you can see around what might happen if we were completely true in all of our conversations so I believe it is a necessary evil, but only if you use it sparingly. The end of the movie is more of an example of what would happen if you were to base every relationship and your entire life based on lies. All in all, I think the grand epiphany here is that lying is actually a necessary part of human interaction as horrible as that may sound, but only certain types of lies. White lies and minor untruths about certain things are fine in my eyes but as soon as it starts to engulf your personality and you use lies to promote yourself in another's eyes is when it starts to lead to ones destruction.